The Lion Diet, popularized by Mikhaila Peterson, is a highly restrictive elimination diet that centers around the consumption of ruminant animal meat, salt, and water. It is often considered a part-elimination diet, part carnivore diet, and part autoimmune protocol. Proponents suggest it can help identify food sensitivities and alleviate various health issues. However, it's crucial to approach this diet with caution and awareness of its potential risks and limitations.
What is the Lion Diet?
The Lion Diet is a more restrictive version of the carnivore diet. It eliminates all foods except meat from ruminant animals (beef, lamb, goat, bison, and deer), salt, and water. The goal is to remove potential inflammatory triggers from the diet and then slowly reintroduce foods to identify sensitivities.
Mikhaila Peterson originally discovered this all-meat diet as a viable option when dealing with a severe autoimmune condition that was tanking her quality of life.
How Does the Lion Diet Work?
The Lion Diet functions as an elimination diet. The intention is to determine which foods contribute to issues like inflammation, fatigue, and digestive problems. By eliminating almost all foods from your diet, you can hopefully eliminate what’s causing your issues. Taking a few months to sustain yourself with this diet is intended to heal your gut, body, and brain. Then, once you’ve healed your body, you can begin adding foods back into your diet. Add them in slowly, so that you have time to determine if you are experiencing an inflammatory reaction. Some reactions may not occur instantly. Depending on your body’s reaction to the reintroduced food, you can either keep that food in your diet, or restrict it again. Once you’ve finished reintroducing foods and assessing reactions, you’ll have a list of foods that you know make your body feel good.
Foods Allowed
- Meat from ruminant animals: beef, lamb, goat, bison, and deer
- Salt
- Water
Foods to Avoid
All other food groups are banned on the Lion Diet, including:
Read also: Reversing Autoimmune Disease
- Fruits: apples, peaches, plums, berries, melons, pears, bananas
- Vegetables: potatoes, broccoli, kale, cauliflower, peppers, carrots, mushrooms
- Grains: bread, pasta, quinoa, oats, buckwheat, rice
- Legumes: beans, lentils, chickpeas
- Nuts: almonds, walnuts, macadamia nuts, pistachios, cashews
- Seeds: chia seeds, flaxseed, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds
- Dairy products: milk, yogurt, cheese, ice cream, butter
- Meat from nonruminant animals: bacon, ham, pork chops, rabbit meat
- Poultry: chicken, turkey, duck, goose
- Seafood: salmon, trout, anchovies, mackerel, shrimp, oysters, lobster
- Fats: olive oil, ghee, coconut oil, avocado oil, margarine
- Beverages: coffee, tea, soda, juice, beer, wine
Potential Benefits
Followers of the Lion Diet have reported several benefits, including:
- Decreased inflammation
- Improvements in mood
- Relief from issues like headaches, insomnia, and allergies
- Reduction in chronic pain symptoms
Because inflammation and digestive issues are at the root of many chronic illnesses, the Lion Diet can help with chronic illness symptoms. Similarly, symptoms of chronic pain may decrease as the inflammatory foods are no longer around to trigger them. This study found that increasing anti-inflammatory foods was positively correlated with a reduction in stress and pain.
The Lion Diet often induces a state of ketosis, which is where your body burns ketones (AKA fat) for energy. This study indicates that the benefits of a ketogenic diet don’t stop at metabolic health. As the Lion Diet frequently induces a ketogenic state, it can help regulate your blood sugar as well. Ketogenic diets have been found to lower blood glucose levels, especially in those with Type II diabetes. And if all that wasn’t enough, you may be able to hit your weight loss goals using this diet!
Potential Risks and Drawbacks
Despite anecdotal reports of benefits, the Lion Diet carries significant risks and drawbacks:
- Nutrient deficiencies: The diet completely eliminates many healthy foods, including fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, and seeds. This makes it difficult for you to get the nutrients your body needs. Untreated nutritional deficiencies can cause a wide variety of issues, including weakness, impaired immune function, bone loss, pain, bruising, anemia, and neurological problems. The Lion Diet is also lacking in fiber, an important compound found in plant foods that can support regularity, blood sugar control, and heart health.
- High in saturated fat: Animal products, including meat, are very high in saturated fat. In some people, saturated fat can increase levels of LDL (bad) cholesterol, which is a risk factor for heart disease.
- Unsustainable: The Lion Diet is difficult to follow and unsustainable in the long term. Since the diet offers little to no flexibility, it can be nearly impossible to eat out at restaurants or enjoy food in other social settings while following the diet. Eliminating certain foods from your diet can also increase food cravings, making this diet even more challenging to stick to. It also promotes unhealthy eating habits and may not be suitable for those with a history of disordered eating.
- Increased risk of heart disease: At roughly 50-60% of calories coming from saturated fat (SFA), the diet recommends daily SFA calories in excess of the upper limits seen in ground breaking studies like PURE, which were more liberal than the current U.S Dietary Guidelines with some of their cohorts. The highest quintile of SFA consumption in PURE ate 14% of daily calories from SFA and saw lower stroke risk, but anecdotal evidence of carnivore dieters suffering from strokes is on the rise. Many people will see unhealthy increases in LDL-C and APOB on the Lion Diet.
- Potential for increased TMAO levels: In a similar vein to the concern about increased intestinal permeability on the Lion Diet, there is also a very real concern that TMAO levels, a metabolite of carnitine and other amino acids in red meat that has been shown to be a driver of heart disease risk, may rise to very unhealthy levels eating an all red meat diet.
- Burden on the liver: On the Lion Diet, where beef is consumed in large quantities at every meal, the constant influx of nitrogen from protein can place a significant burden on the liver’s urea cycle.
Is the Lion Diet Right for You?
No diet is right for E V E R Y O N E, but we like this one. Of course, it’s important to recognize that, as with ALL elimination diets, you may not be getting all the vitamins you’d normally get from plant foods. It’s important to supplement this type of diet with essential vitamins. As always when it comes to your health, consult your doctor before beginning this diet regimen. There are factors that may mean this diet is not the right one for you. For example, this diet is high in saturated fats, so it may not be appropriate for those with a history of heart disease.
Read also: Carnivore Diet Recipes
Elimination diets, such as the carnivore diet, the Lion Diet, and the autoimmune protocol, are highly restrictive diets. Because they’re so highly restrictive, a lot of people raise their eyebrows at these diets. And, if you don’t know the benefits, we understand why.
The Lion Diet is not recommended as a treatment for any health condition. In fact, consuming large amounts of red meat may lead to flare-ups in people with certain conditions, such as rheumatoid arthritis (11).
It’s best to talk with a healthcare professional before trying an elimination diet to ensure you’re getting enough nutrients and avoid negative health effects.
How to Follow the Lion Diet
- Weaning in: When you are first beginning the lion diet, you may want to wean into it. It’s a pretty intense diet. Of course, if that’s your thing, go for it. This step is optional.
- Elimination phase: Switch your diet to only ruminant meat, salt, and water. While participating in this step, make sure you’re logging your symptoms. It’s easy to forget to keep track, but that may make it more confusing when you add foods back in later.
- Reintroduction phase: Once you’ve completed your three months on the Lion Diet, it’s time to reintroduce foods. It is especially important that you track your symptoms at this stage. Give your body a few days to adapt to each new food before introducing another. Mikhaila recommends reintroducing foods in a similar order that you weaned into the diet.
A 7-Day Sample Menu for the Lion Diet
In general, you will estimate how much meat and calories you need per day, according to the FAQ. For example, Mikhaila says she’s 5 feet 6 inches tall and eats 1.5 pounds (lbs) of meat per day. She adds that a 6-foot-tall man should eat 2.5 lbs of meat per day, though you’d adjust based on your hunger level. At the outset, if eating a lot of fattier cuts of meat is unpleasant, she recommends eating lean cuts of meat.
In the FAQ, Mikhaila says she ate two ribeye steaks per day for the first months of the diet and now eats mostly lamb, though you do not have to do the same. Your choices are based on what makes you feel the best. Purchase the highest quality meat you can afford, though she says that beef patties (make sure there’s no pepper) from fast food restaurants are just fine.
Read also: Exploring the Carnivore Diet
Below is a sampling of what types of meats you might eat on the lion diet on a day-to-day basis, though the specific type of meat, number of meals or snacks, what time you eat, and how much is up to you (that is, the diet doesn’t detail portion size recommendations). The most important thing is that you’re eating only the allowed meats.